Olbermann's Return Won't Restore Sanity

Two weeks of media melodrama bracket a tumultuous election that shook up American politics, putting a spotlight on the people who presumably report on the spectacle but more and more are out there strutting on the stage.

Keith Olbermann will be back from the on-camera dead tomorrow night after his constituency, and many journalists, showered NBC with Tea Partyish rage. But there should be no unalloyed joy over his resurrection, which only confirms what critic David Carr calls "the Foxification of the cable universe."

Olbermann's return will correct an absurdity but do nothing for what Jon Stewart calls Sanity. As Carr points out:

"The shift of audiences toward cable news outlets--with their manifest agendas--as sources of truth and transparency may have something to do with a credibility gap that now confronts more mainstream news outfits. Lately, the idea of objective journalism has been on a pretty rough ride (that means you, CNN), with viewers deciding to align themselves with outlets that share their points of view--warts, agendas and all."

Stewart's rally was held on the weekend before the voting. Significantly, when the President appeared on the Daily Show just before it took place, he ruefully suggested that the reminder was coming two years late.

Looking back on 60 Minutes yesterday, Obama remarked that "this country doesn't just agree with The New York Times editorial page...I can make some really good arguments defending the Democratic position, and there are gonna be some people who just don't agree with me. And that's okay. And then we've got to figure out a way to compromise."

So Olbermann is back, which is all to the good as balance for the growing Fox dominance of the tower of babble, but the underlying problem is worse than ever.

In a cameo appearance on Election Night, the ghost of Journalism Past, Tom Brokaw, observed that "almost nothing is going the way that most people have been told that it will. And every time they’re told in Washington that they have it figured out, it turns out not to be true."

On cable news, "true" is not the highest priority.

Update: Olbermann apologizes to his viewers but not to his bosses for all the furor. Just so. Now we can all get back to watching the PBS NewsHour to get the news of the day.

Michelle Obama/Sarah Palin: Cool/Hot

Last night's debate showed a contrast between two men of different generations, speaking styles and body language. Tonight the TV screens offered disparity of another gender, between Michelle Obama with Larry King and Jon Stewart, and Sarah Palin out on the stump with John McCain.

Comparing these 21st century women calls up the distinction Marshall McLuhan made in the early days of TV between cool and hot personalities, citing the differences between JFK and Nixon.

Palin's hotness is not erotic but, in McLuhanese, an aggressive style that works on the listener to get a pre-determined reaction that leaves no room for ambivalence or ambiguity, eliciting primal responses such as "Kill him" to her attacks on Barack Obama.

Little wonder that conservative David Brooks calls her "a cancer on the Republican Party" out of a populist tradition with prejudices that "scorn ideas entirely."

Michelle Obama, on the other hand, is the essence of cool, shrugging off McCain's calling her husband "that one" as part of the political game and just smiling when Jon Stewart tried to get a rise out of her about Palin.

Cool media and personalities, McLuhan asserted, are inclusive, inviting watchers into their world instead of manipulating them to their own purposes. If the Obamas get to the White House, they could turn out to be the coolest couple since JFK and Jackie.

High-Fives for Fake News

Journalism research today shows devotees of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to be better-informed than watchers of cable news shows hosted by Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly and Larry King, thereby raising the question of whether it's more helpful to lampoon the news than slobber all over it.

Asked which party now controls Congress, who is the current US secretary of state and to name the new prime minister of Great Britain, Comedy Central viewers outscored those who watch most cable TV news programs as well as those who claim to read newsmagazines and daily newspapers.

On the weekend, the New York Times asked, "Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?" with critic Michiko Kakutani concluding the Daily Show "has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news.

"'The Daily Show' resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic."

What Stewart and Colbert tonight will make of two men aspiring to the most powerful position in the world being quizzed like schoolboys by a best-selling, pop culture clergyman remains to be seen, but it's clear that only connoisseurs of the ridiculous can do the sight justice.

Studying Jon Stewart

"The Daily Show performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature, getting people to think critically about the public square. In that sense, it is a variation of the tradition of Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and other satirists who once graced the pages of American newspapers."

That's the conclusion of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism after studying Jon Stewart and his merry crew for an entire year, buttressed by the fact that the Daily Show "not only assumes, but even requires, previous and significant knowledge of the news on the part of viewers if they want to get the joke."

The study picks up on the fact that the show is as much about media criticism as political satire by noting, "The press itself is another significant focus on The Daily Show. In all, 8% of the time was made up of segments about the press and news media. That is more than double the amount of coverage of media in the mainstream press overall during the same period."

In a time when MSM are featuring jokers like Robert Novak, William Kristol and Karl Rove, it's comforting to see some academic recognition of commentators who are being intentionally funny.

Back to the Political Future

"I don't belong to any organized party," Will Rogers liked to say, "I'm a Democrat."

Imagine Jon Stewart in a cowboy hat, twirling a lariat and talking with a nasal twang. That was Will Rogers in the 1930s, the most popular political satirist of his time, who did monologues back then on the idiocy of the Washington power structure.

Imagine what he would have to say about superdelegates, caucuses and the Florida-Michigan brouhaha.

“Democrats never agree on anything, that's why they're Democrats," Rogers explained. "If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.”

Nothing changes, except to get funnier--and sadder. The cowboy nailed it all by observing, "The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected."

When Washington lawmakers wanted to put up a statue of him, Rogers agreed but only if it were facing the House Chamber, so he could "keep an eye on Congress." It's the only one facing the entrance and, according to Capitol guides, Presidents rub his left shoe for good luck before entering to give the State of the Union Address.

The old cowboy would get a kick out of that.

No More Oscars for Jon Stewart

Two years ago, it might have just been the unease of doing something new before hundreds of millions of people, but last night made it clear: Jon Stewart shouldn't be hosting the Academy Awards.

With his exquisite sense of the absurd, Stewart can't break through the defenses of an audience that takes its own absurdity solemnly, and he is much too polite to provoke them outrageously. So he is reduced to making lame, outdated jokes about Dennis Hopper's drug haze and MCing a la Larry King--a little like watching a thoroughbred pulling a rusty plow.

Send back the clowns with their one-liners and let Stewart concentrate on saving our sanity on the Daily Show.

An Outbreak of Civility

Everybody got the memo, except Charlie Rangel who was still bashing Barack Obama yesterday afternoon, but by nightfall in Las Vegas, it was all sweetness and light at the Democratic round table (debate would be too harsh a word for what Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards did for two hours).

For this news cycle at least, the politics of personal destruction gave way to earnest discussion of how to repair the Bush damage to America at home and around the world.

Something important must have happened to Sen. Clinton when she was 25 because she kept referring to her 35 years of experience as a qualification for the Presidency, while John Edwards kept reminding us how "personal" all the issues were for him and Barack Obama spoke often about bringing people together.

Compared to the headlines of the past week, it was all touchy-feely and rather restful.

Turning to the writerless Daily Show, the new civility was evident there too as the usually cantankerous John Bolton stopped Jon Stewart in his tracks by agreeing with him about Middle East policy while plugging his new book.

It won't last, but for the time being, it's a nice (forgive the cliché) change.

Nuts-and-Bolton on Iran

As most thinking Americans breathe a sigh of relief over the NIE report on Iran, John Bolton on the editorial page of the Washington Post, that island of insanity in a screw-loose world, is here to preserve our patriotic paranoia.

The thing has flaws, and who are these spooks to tell us what the stuff they gather means? "Too much of the intelligence community," Bolton writes, "is engaging in policy formulation rather than 'intelligence' analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it."

The man who was too disagreeable to be confirmed as US Ambassador to the UN, Scooter Libby's defender, who lectured Jon Stewart with fake news about Lincoln on the Daily Show, who has been out-Cheneying the Neo-Cons in pushing Bush to attack Iran, that John Bolton wants us to know that the NIE is rash in its "psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives" based on "internally contradictory and insufficiently supported" data, is being suckered by disinformation from Iran and relies too much on "the latest hot tidbit" from its spies.

Moreover, Bolton reveals, many are "not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department" who had "relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago, now...writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high."

Bolton, who has been hearing voices from on high much longer, outranks them all and is just the clear-sighted expert to set us straight.

"No Money, No Funny"

Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jay Leno and David Letterman won't be doing monologues about today's news tonight because their brains are on strike. More than 12,000 TV and movie writers are walking picket lines in New York and Los Angeles, carrying signs like "No Money, No Funny."

The Writers Guilds want a bigger share for their members of revenue from DVD and Internet sales of movies and TV shows, producers are balking and pickets are out chanting digital age slogans, "No downloads!"

But instead of hard hats and work boots, the New York Times reports, today's Norma Raes are sporting arty glasses and fancy scarves.

Ever since the early days of Hollywood, writers have had to fight for respect and money. Producers called them "gag men" back then and treated them like the flunkies who brought the doughnuts and coffee to the set.

The network series and movie distributors have a backlog of new offerings to keep them going but, for a generation that gets most of its news from the Daily Show and other late-night programs, it's going to be re-run city for a while.

MSM and bloggers will have to take up the slack.

Spies, Secrets and Sexy Women

Mata Hari would have been mortified, and James Bond might have been stirred, even shaken. Here last night was Valerie Plame, the kind of elegant woman you meet at a Washington cocktail party, talking to Jon Stewart about what the CIA has redacted from her new book in a section about breast-feeding her baby.

Spying is not what it used to be and, from newly released figures, getting more costly and complicated all the time. This year the government is spending $43.5 billion on spy services, up from $26.6 billion a decade ago, according to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence.

What's more, since 9/11, most of it has been outsourced to civilian contractors in what amounts to a Blackwatering of national spy operations.

The Washington Post has quoted a former senior Pentagon intelligence official about the difficulty of military efforts in Iraq to provide human intelligence sources to forces that rotate out after tours of a single year. "That is hardly enough time to develop serious, dependable Iraqi sources," he said.

As with so much of what goes on in our Iraq adventure, we have no way of knowing who is being paid how much to do what to whom. Are we employing exotic dancers to seduce officials, as Mata Hari presumably did during World War I? Or are most of our spies office-bound matrons like Valerie Plame Wilson?

Unless or until Dick Cheney gets teed off at one of their husbands, we may never know.

Nixon/Frost: Poster Boys for Opportunism

Last night Bill Maher interviewed the ghost of David Frost and brought back a rush of memories about Richard Nixon, the 1970s' president who lied and broke laws with heartfelt sincerity.

Maher deferentially let Frost, with customary sliminess, rewrite the Iraq war into a little misunderstanding in which Americans and British went in willingly, without bothering to mention that up to 2 million people in London and hundreds of thousands in New York and Washington were in the streets protesting before it started.

But Frost, now immortalized in a play and upcoming movie for his post-resignation interviews, is remembered by contemporaries as a perfect match for Nixon, poster boys for smarmy opportunism. Typically, his "hard-hitting" interview with the disgraced President was the result of relentless cajoling.

The James Lipton of his day, Frost snagged unctuous sitdowns with Presidents and Prime Ministers, while earning the scorn of the Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe satirists, who called him the "Bubonic Plagiarist" for stealing their satirical approach to the news in his other incarnation.

For an approximation of Frost at his zenith, imagine a tireless, disingenuous combination of Jon Stewart and Larry King with unlimited ambition and greed.

His counterpart, Nixon, ended in disgrace but Sir David Frost, a multimillionaire and now host on the Al Jazeera English Channel, is still with us, pimping his way through history.

The Comedy Central Campaign

Stephen Colbert, who is no Jon Stewart, is beginning to give irony a bad name. On Meet the Press yesterday he proved that (a) there is no way of parodying the jokers who are running for President in ’08 and (b) that putting on Tim Russert is too easy--politicians have been doing it for years.

Colbert told him he is running because “I think our country is facing unprecedented challenges in the future. And I think that the junctures that we face are both critical and unforeseen, and the real challenge is how we will respond to these junctures, be they unprecedented or unforeseen, or, God help us, critical.”

John Edwards or Mitt Romney could not have said it better, and they undoubtedly have.

The Sunday before, Maureen Dowd took a day off and let Colbert write her New York Times column. His sly wit made a reader long for Dowd’s invective.

About Hillary Clinton, he wrote, “I can’t remember if I’m supposed to be scared of her so Democrats will think they should nominate her when she’s actually easy to beat, or if I’m supposed to be scared of her because she’s legitimately scary.

“Or Rudy Giuliani. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to support him because he’s the one who can beat Hillary if she gets nominated, or if I’m supposed to support him because he’s legitimately scary.”

The Presidential candidates are doing a great job of making fools of themselves. They don’t need professional help.

Nixon Nostalgia

Dick Cavett, the best celebrity interviewer of the 1970s, just can’t let go of Richard Nixon. On his wonderful New York Times blog, the last three entries have been about the Great Unindicted Co-Conspirator. I know just how he feels.

Cavett's current post recalls seeing Himself in the flesh at a restaurant with his daughter Julie during the Ford Administration.

“I grabbed up two menus,” Cavett writes. “Approaching the famous seated pair from behind, I piped, 'Our specials today include the Yorba Linda soufflé, the Whittier College clam chowder . . .' I invented a few more fictional Nixon-related specials; you get the idea. At least I self-censored any Checkers or Watergate references.”

Nixon was not amused. Nor was he much taken with a Cavett anecdote about the smell of burning paper at a White House dinner interpreted as the infamous Veep Spiro Agnew being in the library.

“Oh, I see,” Nixon finally said with a straight face. “Book burning.”

Years from now, will a retired Jon Stewart be writing on his blog about George Bush not being amused by Dick Cheney jokes?

No-Name Ties Rudy and Fred in G.O.P. Poll

The Rev. James Dobson has pronounced them all value-less in a New York Times OpEd no less, and Republicans of all persuasions seem concerned about their Presidential front runners.

In the oddest expression of discontent, in a “blind” Zogby poll based on anonymous bios, as many G.O.P. voters have just chosen an unknown Defense Department official as Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson.

When the electorate is as enthusiastic about nobody as it is about everybody on the ballot, the Party should be thinking about what’s missing in their field. To oversimplify, voters seem to be finding Giuliani shameless, Thompson listless, Romney clueless and McCain hopeless.

America’s Mayor, with 9/11 tattooed on his forehead, has been an attack dog on two continents, accusing Hillary Clinton of “spewing venom” when she politely questioned Gen. Petraeus, labeling her health insurance proposal “Hillycare” and otherwise acting like a schoolyard bully.

After hiding in the weeds for months, Thompson, the road-show Reagan, has crept out into the open, barely, to bore and confuse voters with his disdain for details.

Romney has as many stances on issues as dollars for TV commercials, but the party faithful are not buying in droves.

McCain is still showing up to jaw with Jon Stewart, apparently unaware that Daily Show viewers are not a prime demographic for the Republican primaries.

Less is definitely not more is this contest, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see a boomlet for Dr. Ward Casscells, a conservative now assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, who did so well in the Zogby poll. As an expert on pandemics, he just might catch on.

The Daily Show's Giant Head Speaks Out

For a new generation, Ted Koppel is the old guy on a huge screen behind Jon Stewart who occasionally reminds the fake-news anchor what real journalists do. Yesterday, he had some tougher things to say to future news people.

At a Fordham University forum sponsored by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the 67-year-old Koppel weighed in on the fate of 75-year-old Dan Rather, who is suing CBS for mistreating him in the furor over George Bush’s National Guard Service and failure to serve in Vietnam.

It was a “travesty,” Koppel said, that Rather was “squeezed out” for a story that was “much more correct than incorrect.”

Expanding on the woes of journalists at TV networks owned by self-protecting conglomerates, he pointed out that, as part of the Walt Disney Company, “ABC News is a pimple on the elephant’s behind.”

Last night Koppel got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the TV Academy. Looking back, he told a TelevisionWeek reporter why could never get an interview with Bush in the White House.

When the Decider was first running in 2000, Koppel asked what qualified him and Bush cited his experience as a governor, running a baseball team, and the fact that he was a loving husband and father.

Koppel observed that those were good qualifications for a president of the Kiwanis Club, but not the United States. He could never get to see Bush again, but Koppel may have doing the Kiwanis an injustice.

McCain's Tenuous Comeback

Once the media writes an obituary, the departed is supposed to stay dead. But John McCain is showing signs of new life with David Petraeus as his savior and Don Rumsfeld as the straw man to distance himself from Bush’s bungling of Iraq.

The Straight Talk Express, now re-dubbed “No Surrender,” is on the road again picking up some momentum but, as seen on “Meet the Press” today, McCain will have to overcome not only other Republican contenders but his own tendency toward testiness under fire.

In debating John Kerry, he started out with a smooth, subdued testimonial to his own good judgment about pacifying Iraq that was ignored by Rumsfeld et al but is now being vindicated by Petraeus’ “success.”

But as Kerry challenged him, McCain’s smile froze, jaws tightened and he kept using his tell-tale expression of hostility, “My friend”--exposing the hot-headed impatience with criticism that is the other side of the affability McCain always shows with Jon Stewart.

As the oldest candidate in the Republican field, it will be hard enough to emulate Bill Clinton’s feat in 1992 as the “Comeback Kid,” but McCain has some traction now as the most experienced potential Commander-in-Chief to navigate a Republican course toward peace in Iraq as the polls show Fred Thompson slowing the effects of Rudy Giuliani’s conversion to conservatism.

But if McCain is to make his case for a strong, steady hand at the helm in the face of terrorist turbulence, he had better start showing it.

If not, media pundits will be ready and waiting to justify their obituaries.

A Test for Jon Stewart

From today’s USA Today: “First Lady Laura Bush and daughter Jenna Bush are writing a children's book about a boy who doesn't like to read. It is based on their experiences as teachers.”

Teachers? The Daily Show writers must be in a tizzy, but only a cad would comment in print.

Mitt Strikes Out Again

Outbidding the patriot Nathan Hale by a factor of five, Governor Romney told Iowa voters that he regrets having only five sons to give to his country. Grateful Americans can only hope that none of them comes back from hazardous electioneering, as Jon Stewart fears, as casualties of Post-Campaign Stress Syndrome.

In their first year, the New York Mets had a first baseman nicknamed Marvelous Marv Throneberry who set records for making errors. Marvelous Mitt is on track to becoming the Barry Bonds of boners in the annals of presidential candidates for muffs and miscues.

Yesterday the former governor of Massachusetts added to his string by misstating the number of counties in the state he ran for four years.

John Kerry, Stand-Up

He’s at it again. The 2004 Democratic nominee who took himself out of a possible ’08 re-run with a badly told joke is back going for the funny again. The reviews suggest he shouldn’t give up his day job.

At a Democratic fundraiser last week, Kerry had a limerick about his Senate colleague who got into trouble by being on the D.C. Madam’s phone list:

“There once was a man named Vitter/Who vowed that he wasn’t a quitter/But with stories of women/And all of his sinnin’/He knows his career’s in the — oh, never mind.”

Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are safe, but John Kerry shouldn’t despair. It won’t get any laughs but he is doing good work by joining Hillary Clinton in introducing a bill
requiring the Pentagon to brief Congress on contingency plans for withdrawing from Iraq.

There’s more than one way of being a stand-up guy.

Dwarfing Jon Stewart

It's hard to get to sleep being haunted by visions of the hugeness of Michael Moore on the Daily Show a few hours ago. Did he eat Al Gore?